Put your mind in a zone and get calm

Wednesday

Nov 28, 2007 at 2:00 AM

Leslie Garcia

Before we hand over this healthy virtue, we need you to put away the groceries, drop off the kids, close the door to the messiest room in your house. Turn off the TV, ignore your boss, put the school counselor on hold, turn off the heat on the pot boiling over.

All set? Then close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Take another. And another.

What do you need us for? You just gave yourself what we had planned as our gift to you: calm.

You can find it in a forest, on a sailboat, at the dinner table surrounded by friends. Maybe it engulfs you as you lie in a hammock. Or you're a quarter-mile above the timber line, and there is something so achingly beautiful about the white clouds and blue sky and how wonderful your sandwich tasted. And without warning or explanation, you think you may start to cry.

This is where we want to return, if only in our minds. In this spot, we deal with deadlines, burned casseroles, someone cutting us off on the highway.

We each have, inside ourselves, ways to bring about the calm when chaos seems to be winning. We asked four people how they do it.

"The main thing is try not to sweat the little things," said Richard Weiner, 59, chairman of neurosurgery at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, Texas. "You don't want to have personal issues, personal phone calls. Everybody here knows how to move around quietly."

Talk to him, and you sense the calm, even when millimeters and milliseconds don't count.

"You can be laid-back but aggressive if you have to be," Weiner said. "You learn that in your training. You find role models and decide how to develop your personal persona based on those."

The one he chose "could be calm in a complete catastrophe. You learn how to translate that to the patients and their families. You must come out and talk to them and be calm."

Weiner is also a licensed pilot, another skill for which calm is imperative.

"When we take off, you're always taught to anticipate an engine failure, to have a game plan," he said. "What if the engine dies and you're 100 feet in the air? In the OR, what happens if this ruptures?

"I do think adverse events are a cascade, a series of things that lead up to something terrible. You try to make sure you don't start going down the wrong path and have those that could lead to catastrophe. That does include being in the right zone in your mind, not have people distracting you, not have distracting phone calls."

As necessary as calm is, he said, you don't want to go through life being overly calm, which can border on the boring.

"You have to be careful not to be dull-calm," he said. "You can be sensitive-calm."

Rita Clarke maintains calm much of the time by one simple act: breathing.

"Isn't that a weird sentence, 'Remember to breathe?'" asked Clarke, 67, who lives in Farmers Branch, Texas. Rather appropriately, she does volunteer work for the Dallas Peace Center.

It takes practice, said Clarke, whose learning process began when she and her husband were having health problems and needed to reduce stress. She bought audiotapes made by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who holds a doctorate in molecular biology. He has researched stress management and mindful meditation.

"His tapes helped me get it into my head: Don't just pull in air, breathe it into my body," she said. "The media is kind of manic; it deals a lot in snappy, zippy phrases and punchy graphics. This is opposite. This takes time; this takes intention. This takes quiet, no outside noises. And you're doing it for yourself first. You're not doing it for anyone else in the beginning."

What happens, though, is that when you are calm, people around you reap the benefits — their stress levels go down, she said.

"I had to get to a point in my life where I was able ... to close the door, sit down, breathe deeply, go inside yourself but be right in that moment, not in the next hour, the next day, anticipating the next challenge," Clarke said.

Unlike many of us, Laura Miller finds calm in her profession. She's an aesthetician and massage therapist; clients come to her seeking calm.

In 14 years of her profession in Addison, Texas, she has developed a sense for people: when they want to talk, and when they want to be alone with their thoughts.

"When I steam their faces, I leave the room and tell them to focus on deep breathing," said Miller, 37. "That forces them to relax. A lot of people don't make time to meditate, to do things for themselves."

She is by nature a calm person. Yet when life's stresses take their toll, she, like Clarke, finds calm in deep breathing.

"You forget to do that," she said. "When I think about it and do it, it's very relaxing."

Life is so stressful, she said. The Internet and cell phones are there to make our lives easier and more efficient. They also make people multitask and overachieve.

"You have to make downtime," she said. "It's hard to remind ourselves. At times, I am frazzled and have 100 things going through my mind I need to do. I'll consciously say, 'OK, Laura, focus on what you're doing right now.' And that brings calm to me. Be present in the moment, whether you're with someone or doing something."

She finds calm in the simple things, she said: her good health, being content with what she has. Yet, sometimes, she needs a respite from calm.

"I spend my entire day being in a dim room with chimes, a waterfall, soft music, the warmth of people I touch," she said. "It's such a calming atmosphere, but sometimes I'll get in the car after work and play hard rock."

For Mike Moses, studying tae kwon do and tai chi have been extensions of his innate calm.

"Tai chi is known more as a softer martial art and works on internal strength," said Moses, 46. "It is done at a slow pace, with the focus on breathing and relaxation."

He earned a black belt in tae kwon do almost two years ago and started studying tai chi last year.

"To spend time doing tai chi is a time to enjoy being calm and peaceful," said Moses, a software developer in Dallas and father of two. "Just like other people who might practice gardening or quilting, or running half-marathons. When they come over that last hill, they're not worried about their checkbook or whether the car needs repairs."

Tae kwon do cultivates the same skills, yet adds kicking and striking. To be good at it, he said, "You have to be internally calm."

He has always thought of himself that way, as well as his parents and an older brother. At a young age, he realized that being calm helped him be more successful academically and athletically.

"You seemed to achieve more if you were calm, to maintain an even emotional and mental demeanor," Moses said. "It seemed like the best way to succeed to me."

He is not calm all the time, he said. But his desire to be in that place helps him return to it.

"Being calm is a priority for me," he said. "It's a goal. It is something I choose to be."

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